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I watched the other women, and the one or two men, and I felt something. Lust, I think, it was lust, but it was as if their lust was solid enough to grab, to pull out of the air itself and wrap around my body like a coat. Jean-Claude’s voice whispered through my head, “Ma petite, do you want to know how to feed on their lust, to feed without touching?”

“You know I do,” I whispered.

And it was like before with Primo, it was as if he stepped inside my skin almost, so that I suddenly knew what he knew. I knew how to open myself up and pull in the thick air. It wasn’t like breathing, and it wasn’t like feeding when I touched someone, it was closer to literally pulling at the air with metaphysical hands and dragging the lust hand over hand and pulling it inside me. It was the oddest sensation, as if the lust were silk or satin and I pulled it inside my body, as if silk scarves could pass through a hole in my skin. The sensation felt like I’d made a wound in my body and was pulling things through that wound. It was a sensation just this side of pain.

Jean-Claude’s voice in my head, “It will not be so uncomfortable when you have practiced it.”

“It feels awful.”

“But are you feeding?” he asked.

I had to think about it, because all my attention was on how disturbing it felt to draw the lusts of strangers inside me. But once I thought about it, I realized I was feeding. I felt less cold than I had, but . . . “Do you ever fill up this way?”

“It keeps one from starving, but it is not a meal, no.”

I don’t know what I would have said to that, because suddenly Nathaniel was in front of me. I think he was repeating himself, but I hadn’t heard him the first time. “I said, do you want to come play with the kitty?”

Jean-Claude was gone from my head, and I’d stopped feeding from the audience. Everything just shut down, everything but the lavender eyes staring at me from the edge of the stage. His hand was held out. Women’s voices were calling, “I’m not shy . . . pick me, if she doesn’t want to go. Brandon, Brandon, she doesn’t want you, but I do . . .”

I put my hand in his, but I made a face to show just how uneasy this whole thing made me. I didn’t like to dance where strangers, or even friends, could see me. Being dragged on stage at a strip club was so far beyond my comfort level. Until that moment, I hadn’t really thought about what it would mean to mark him tonight. On stage, in front of people. Eek!

I stumbled going up on the stage, because I remembered the short skirt and the lack of anything under it, so I was very ladylike getting up on stage. Trouble was the stage was too high from the floor to be that ladylike, so I stumbled, and he caught me and gave me a look. That look gave me a last refuge. That look said, If you can’t do this, I’ll let it go. He would have, too, but I also knew that if it wasn’t me, it was going to be someone else. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure how I felt about watching him get pawed, or paw another woman. The fact that I thought flaunting myself up on stage would be a lesser evil than watching someone else flaunt themselves at Nathaniel, said clearly that my priorities had become skewed.

They’d brought a chair up on stage, and I hadn’t seen it. The money was missing from his G-string, I think he’d put it with the pile at the end of the stage. I hadn’t seen that either, which meant that I’d missed some of the act while I was feeding off the audience.

He led me to the chair and sat me down in it with a flourish of his arm. I looked up at him and knew that the look on my face was suspicious. It said clearly, What are you going to do to me?

He laughed, and it was that full-throated laugh that turned his face from handsome to something younger, more innocent, for lack of a better word. I valued that laugh, because I didn’t get to hear it often. If me sitting here like this made him feel that good, then it just couldn’t be that bad.

He put a hand on the back of the chair on either side of my shoulders, leaning his face very close into mine. I could see the eyeliner around his lavender eyes now and realized